The country-house setting was especially relished by the queen of crime herself, Agatha Christie. This interest is discussed in both Hilary Macaskill’s Agatha Christie At Home (2009) and Laura Thompson’s Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life (2018), studies on which this article draws. Beginning with her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), country houses, and the full-rig grandeur of their early 20thcentury life, feature heavily in her writing (although by no means in every story). In and out of these houses, Poirot and Hastings, and, elsewhere, Miss Marple, set their sleuthing minds to work (Fig 3).
Born Agatha Miller in 1890, Christie herself came from comfortably-off stock. Her parents were not country-house dwellers, but certainly part of the gentrified and professional world we encounter in her novels. They moved in county circles; she enjoyed amateur theatricals at Cockington Court, and also met her first husband, a dashing officer in the Royal Flying Corps, at a dance at Ugbrooke Castle, given by Lord and Lady Clifford of Chudleigh.
She grew up in Ashfield, a much-loved, rambling Regency villa on the edge of Torquay (Christie sold it only in the 1930s and desperately tried to buy it back, unsuccessfully, after the Second World War, when she discovered it was to be demolished).
Denne historien er fra November 27, 2019-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra November 27, 2019-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
